Parshah Commentary
Parshat Haazinu, the penultimate portion in the Torah, contains one of Moses’s last speeches to the Israelites. He knows that he is about to ascend Mount Nebo, where he will look from afar at the Promised Land and take his final breaths. He has little time left to instruct the nation he has guided through the wilderness, and in this pivotal moment, he abandons the prose he has used throughout the rest of Devarim and begins to speak in verse. Through his turn to poetry, Moses points the Israelites—and the reader—toward an overwhelmingly expansive vision of God.
He accomplishes this by, in the words of rabbi and Bible scholar Shai Held, “bombard[ing] the reader with a seemingly endless array of theological metaphors.” These metaphors for God appear in rapid succession and often contradict each other. In just a few verses, Moses presents God as male and female, as animate and inanimate, as relatably human and incomprehensibly other. God’s words are dew and rain; God flares up in fire. God labors to birth the people and nurses them like a mother; God is a valiant warrior. God is a rock, steady and fixed; God bears a flashing blade, flying unpredictably through the air. The effect is destabilizing, making it impossible to abide in, or even to comfortably grasp, any one image of the divine. By mixing his metaphors so wildly, Moses seems to be insisting that God is beyond any constrained categories of the human mind.
This swirl of language demands that we understand divinity non-dualistically, a way of thinking that allows us to dwell in contradictions without insisting on resolving them. In an 1817 letter to his brother, the poet John Keats famously described this kind of consciousness as “negative capability”: the state “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability involves a rejection of the idea that there is any one absolute, unassailable way of knowing the world; for Keats, a great artist must accept that contrasting claims or modes of experience can be true simultaneously. Our parshah summons us to a similar awareness not only in its whirlwind of images, but within an individual comparison: Remarking on the verse that compares God to “an eagle who rouses its nestlings, gliding down to its young,” the medieval commentator Rashi writes that an eagle “hovers above its nestlings—touching them and yet not touching them; this [touching and not touching at once] is like God.” Much as Keats saw negative capability as a precondition for producing great art, Rashi sees it as a precondition for a relationship with God.
This vision of God demands profound humility from any theologian or seeker. Indeed, the Hasidic mystic Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev sees this verse as sounding a cautionary note against any form of religious arrogance: “Woe to the person who says, ‘I have arrived, I understand God,’” he explains. In truth, “the higher the level on which someone serves God, the more they come to know how a comprehension of God can never be reached.” Whatever insights one has of God, whatever metaphors one finds helpful and resonant, God is always beyond them.
However humbling this recognition, it can also empower us to experiment freely with our theological language for the divine. The high holiday liturgy is replete with descriptions of God as King; for many of us, such patriarchal and even authoritarian images prove deeply alienating. But our parshah’s capacious, unfixed mode of imagining God can offer license to reconceive of God in newly liberating ways. In a 1989 essay, the poet and liturgist Marcia Falk describes her process of using diverse biblical images—wellsprings, fountains, wind, breath, and more—to “serve as fresh metaphors for Divinity,” in order to “shatter the idolatrous reign of the lord/God/king.” Contrary to those who would dismiss such revision as a heretical, contemporary innovation, our parshah shows that this project—invoking new, subversive metaphors for God to destabilize inherited theological conceptions—has deep roots in Jewish tradition.
For Falk, this feminist work also aimed “to help construct a theology of immanence” to “affirm the sanctity of the world”—that is, to help us turn our attention to the divinity inherent in all things. Our parshah’s profusion of images likewise makes God manifest through the irreducible, beautiful complexity of earthly life. As we emerge from the Days of Awe ready to strive to make this year better than the last, perhaps it might help us hold fast to the certainty of that splendor even as we accept the limits of our understanding.
Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.
